Peg: For decades of my life. And what brings me here today is actually all of you who are on this session and being able to have an opportunity to share our IET journey with you as well as bringing along my esteemed colleague Miranda Loos, who is program director for EnGen. So I would like to present today about some of our IET frustrations as well as some of our challenges and some of the solutions that we found to a few of the things we encountered along the way.

So at Mercer County Community College, we have a very long and varied history with IET dating from the early 2000. So before IET was even IET, we were already thinking about building career pathways for students. And before I got to Mercer County Community College, I worked for another adult literacy program.

And as part of that, I had an opportunity to attend a governor's Institute in another state. At the institute that I attended, there were some factory CEOs and executives there from a major car manufacturer. And they had been looking to open a new manufacturing plant and they had narrowed down their choices through the globe to one of two places, either the US or Canada.

Overall, many things were cheaper in the United States than in Canada, so people were-- the manufacturers were looking to open up their plant here in the US. But then when they went to the next level and they started to look at the workers, they found workers in the United States were not able to read and understand and carry out an instruction manual. But workers in Canada could.

So for the manufacturer to assume operations here in the US, they would have had to rewrite their entire manuals to pictures in place of words. That manufacturer built a plant in Canada over the US. And that was a big eye opener to the state of literacy and the need for worker training in the US. From there, we migrated or my career migrated into adopting a best kind of model. My old program loosely based our IoT model on best out of Washington state.

Then when I came to the college, LaGuardia Community College in New York was up and running a very, very premier pre-college academic contextualized prep program. They were running it. They were doing really awesome. They were having numbers that I really wanted for people in my program.

The students were able to easily transition into a work field or directly into college. And they came down and they trained us. They trained us for about six weeks. And it was a professional development. It was full day, every day. So we received professional development training from one of the premier IT agencies in the country in the early 2000s. After LaGuardia was complete with us, I had a staff meeting, and I said wasn't this a great program?

I had already been to LaGuardia for a couple of weekends and trained before I brought them down to the college. My teachers' responses. I could do this if you bought me a textbook to teach from. If you know IET, that's one of the challenges there is no textbook. Another teacher said, oh, it's a great idea, but I'll do this on a rainy day. In other words, it's just kind of something you put on the side and you think you'll come back to it, maybe when you have no other plans or ideas, which again, is a challenge with teachers, that they're used to going from page one to page 50 or going from one to 35 to back to page 10 and working through a book.

But what about you? What are some things that you have tried? So if you could just post in the chat just any one of these questions. Who are your stakeholders? And who are your students? Are there jobs available in your area? And what is realistic for you to be able to offer?

So please take a minute and just type in and answer to any one of those. And then we'll be able to go on to some of the things that we have tried. Hopefully, some of the progresses that you've tried with your programs match up.

Miranda Loos: I think some are starting to come through. Our students, a large number of English language learners, jobs available in our region, 1,200 medical assisting exact. Thank you for sharing that.

Peg: And it's really all about the students, isn't it? I mean, even as an administrator at this point, we're not even halfway through the year yet and at this point, it really is all about the students. Turn that corner come January, March, especially April, May, June, now it's all about students as numbers because we're chasing the benchmarks that we have to meet. But at this point the year is relatively young, they're all students, they have goals. We're anxious to do what it was that we planned that we were going to do.

And so we did this. At the college, we were-- before 2013-- we were trying IET and we ran into a lot of dead ends. Before it was a requirement of WIOA when it was still WIA, we had tried in IT for hospitality and housekeeping incumbent workers. We have a lot of hotels in our area. So of course, we have a relatively healthy population of incumbent workers.

We also have many people employed as waiters and waitresses. So we try to run a program for waiters and waitresses. We even did first aid CPR AED training. That's a very versatile, not a credential, but a qualification if you want to be a coach, if you want to be a mentor, if you want to be a school bus aid, you want to be early childhood aid, any of those, first aid, CPR, AED training, it's versatile enough, it's an asset.

So when we ran into a lot of dead ends with each of those areas, we went into looking at other some more formal certification areas because at this point, it's 2014, 15, into 16. So we found OSHA. We found OSHA training. It was terrific. It was online modules that teachers could moderate. They could teach the vocabulary. They could walk the students through the modules. The students were learning. It was difficult.

OSHA works at-- there are sequential modules that you have to go through. So our students, we found second language learners, were having trouble with the very first module, which was filling out incident reports following an event at the workplace. So I called OSHA. I called the-- I called the company up and I said this is really great. The students are learning, they're getting certified, we had people getting employed because of OSHA training. It was wonderful. But I wonder if that first module, if somehow we could move that down to later in the program?

Well OSHA was not too happy with that request. And in a not so friendly way, they explained it's a national certification. They don't really have a lot of concern whether they're second language learners or not, that the modules are as the modules are and they wouldn't let us change that. So we went into Microsoft suite and offered certification in any number of the Microsoft Office programs, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

We had hoped if we had some gifted students, really motivated and very talented, we would have been able to get them to access, but that never actually panned out. So that's just great. And maybe you might be thinking, well, this is all really good, but people in Trenton don't really have that much in common with people in California. Well, actually, we do.

Even though we're on the other side of the country, our population in the capital city of New Jersey is about 83,000 people. It's not the smallest city, but it's not the biggest city in New Jersey either. In Trenton, one in four adults is functionally illiterate. Not too far ahead of them are those who are functionally innumerate, one in three. Functionally innumerate means they don't know more than add, subtract, multiply, and divide with basic facts without a calculator accurate 75% of the time, that's functionally innumerate.

Of our foreign born population in Trenton, 40% are Hispanic or Latino descent. Again, of the foreign born population, 60% speak English less than well. Adults, 60%, six out of every 10 are speaking, less than well. And our high school graduation rate, this is a little dated because we have to put a bracket around the last two years, but under unusual circumstances, Trenton Central High School's graduation rate is between 50 and 65%. It means they're losing close to half of their people.

So what does that mean in terms of IT and building a hybrid program? We need to help. Our students are functioning at very, very low levels in terms of adults coming into Title II, most of our students are at NRS levels one, two or three. So we looked for help through many channels, many stakeholders, through other departments at the college, through local workforce development board, through local employers, through my professional network, the professional network of my colleagues, additional funders outside of the New Jersey Department of Labor and workforce development who holds our Title II funds as well as with my consortium partners.

Then when we couldn't really find help that we needed to have to put together a solid IET program New Jersey releases an approved certification list and they kind of loosely said, well your certification should be on this approved list. So one of the areas that's definitely on approved certification is of course, health care. So we tried to have dual attendance with our allied health programs here at the college.

So I have it all set up. I had a senior education specialist, language acquisition specialist. She was assigned to this initiative. Actually, assigned isn't the right word. I should have said she asked to be assigned to this initiative. And the plan was to have students attend allied health in the evenings and she would co-attend with them outside of her normal work hours. Not extra money, not overtime, not stipend, not all of this, she volunteered to do this.

So it was really great. The students would attend with her in an ESL class the next morning and they would follow up what they had learned in the class the night before. We pulled our students and we found a cohort of about 20 of them. So as we got through further and further, we found that of the 20, there were only 12 who were at the level where they could really succeed in an allied health program.

When we explained what the time requirement was, really a full time commitment to their studies, the 12 went down to eight. Slowly the eight didn't have childcare, didn't have transportation, all of the common excuses that we know of our adults, we ended up with three, a cohort of three. From a group of 20 down to three. But it's all right because we're going forward, it's a pilot program. We want to get something up and something to launch.

Two of the three found a job. The day before the class starts, we're down to one student, can enroll or can attend ESL and allied health at the same time. The day before, she gets employment. The whole thing folds. Now shortly after that, in comes COVID and release up another funding cycle for Title II and welcome to 2021 2022.

COVID really crippled our programming because most of our students don't have devices, we do not have a loaner laptop or Chromebook policy, we don't have the funds to go out and buy for students and give them or anything like that. So we're totally independent of being able to offer devices. Most of the students were attending remote classes with a clamp phone because they didn't have an internet connection or device at home.

But COVID really turned out to be a blessing in disguise for our IET program because along came the new Title II funding for 21/22 and it put on us a new requirement we had to do as Title II agencies and we are the lead agency for the county extensive Department of Labor market research about the most commonly anticipated sectors of employment through the next five years, through 2026.

But the information that we found was kind of a little bit depressing because where we're going with this is the IET's need to match up with the job sectors of highest growth potential for our local area. So one of the biggest job openings anticipated through 2026, now we're in 2023, 2022, 23, so we're kind of about halfway through this. Number one area in RN, what do you need to be in RN, a BSN or a higher. Eliminate, remember our data.

Computer software engineer, you need a bachelor's degree or higher. There you go. It looks very depressing. Home health care, warehousing and e-commerce, fast food service, 60% of available jobs in the county projected through 2026. And we've actually tracked this for the last two years. And with the exception of one month out of 25, those available jobs in the County match up to home health care, warehousing, and fast food service.

Now for none of those 60% of the job markets are certifications needed. Neither is a high school equivalency diploma. High school equivalency in case if you're not familiar with that acronym, that's GED or high SAT or TASC depending on what you use. I guess TASC is now out of the mix altogether. But 60%, no certification needed.

Now remember the Trenton stats. One in three can only add, subtract, multiply, and divide without a calculator. One in four can't function in a literate situation. Does it match up with those job openings? Home health care is not home health aide.

Home health care is really a follow up job to, hi, my name is Peg. I'm calling from ABC Hospital. How did you enjoy your stay? I notice you have another return appointment coming up next week. Can I arrange for transportation for you?

Warehousing and e-commerce. We happen to have a large Amazon warehouse in the county. Most of our students are working at the Amazon warehouse and fast food service is not fast food prep. Fast food service is welcome to ABC restaurant. Can I take your order today?

It matches very similarly with the low skills of the population. And this is not a time to get into low wage, low skilled conversation at all, but it is interesting that the job areas that are most available also align with a skill level of the population of Trenton. Now IET in New Jersey is funded for ESL civics students. They bring in another whole layer to an IET that we often see just even in getting them to transition from ESL to ABEHSE classes.

Language barriers. You think it's the language barrier talking about general ESL? Give a sector specific ESL course and you have a lot of barriers. A lot of the ESL students don't have documents that let them gain employment. Many of them don't have valid photo IDs, government issued photo IDs. And last year, we joined a partnership with the refugee resettlement agency in New Jersey, and we agreed to provide classes for our new neighbor refugee students.

And this has really been a learning experience for us in terms of refugees. But we don't only have refugees from places you would think the hotspots of refugee Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Russia. We have them from Central and South American countries. We have them from our Asian-- well near Asian, I guess, Turkey, India, Pakistan. So we have them also.

But the good thing is many of these refugees are foreign trained internationals professionals. So we have all of this going on and where does that lead us? We're tired. COVID exhaustion like anybody else and we're not going to be on COVID because everybody's tired. I'm completely tired from it. Frustrated with every single thing, having to be remote because of COVID.

But on a side note real quick, I couldn't give this presentation to California from New Jersey if it weren't possible by remote. So some good things really come of it. But we have other stakeholders closing in. We have other departments at the college. We have other community-based organizations and everybody's trying to grab at students because in times of great economic stress like now, people become very siloed. And no one is interested in partnerships because they want something for themselves. And we have our funder is now circling in tighter and tighter in terms of what they require for IET.

And so I went to yet another workforce development board meeting, I go to them quarterly. I chair the WDB literacy committee. I went to another large scale meeting. Our career and technical education program was likewise crippled by COVID. But at that meeting for the first time, employers were in need of workers. So I had approached my CTE program in November of 2020 and said, I want to really put together a very tight health care IET program. Can you put together a syllabus? Can you just kind of brainstorm?

And it was a very loose conversation, but she said yes. She was very on board with it. Gave her about 10 weeks, 10 weeks. And she produced a product that I was able to pitch at WDB and said, here's a pilot program that we're running. And I laid out all the specifics.

My local one stop said one stop or America's Job Center or America's Career Center, I'm not sure what it's called in California, New Jersey it's one stop, Pennsylvania it's Career Link, but it's all the same thing, unemployment job training. They said, oh, it seems kind of good. Maybe we'll send some referrals. Two years later, I'm still waiting.

But there were employers there, health care employers and health care employers in desperate need because of COVID. Thank you for the blessing of it because a big turnover in health care. We got the assisted and long-term care facility of New Jersey of the state on the curriculum. We love it. The largest hospital in the county looked at the curriculum, we love it. A city based Health Initiative organization looked at the curriculum and loved it.

So now we have our students. We have our career and technical education program, and we have a health care IET program as our cornerstone program. So what does this really look like because it's not-- we're going to really kind of get into more of the ins and outs now. It's really about IET, whether it's health care or whatever it would be is about fostering student agency. So they're not going to be participating learners if they don't feel that they have some vested interest in this class other than gee, I really like the scrubs.

So it's a matter of building curriculum that is relevant, that stays relevant, that stays current. There is no sector like health care for being different today than it was last year than it was five years ago. So just think about the impact that COVID as a virus has had on health care jobs and the new jobs that have opened up as a result of COVID that didn't exist before.

And we also put into our online learning portal a student made glossary. And we'll take a look at all of these. And I'm going to jump the list and I'm going to say we also put in some case studies for our students to be able to work on and improve their conversations and really get into the conversation around people, patients, health, and what they need to be able to facilitate when they're speaking with patients or with patients' families.

But a very big part of our program and it's resources is EnGen. And without EnGen our curriculum would not be able to remain as current as it is right now. So Miranda, I don't know if you want to step in and give just a little quick overview about some of the features of EnGen and then I'll go back into talking more about the class and how it interfaces with the EnGen.

Miranda Loos: Absolutely. Thanks, Peg. And before we do that, we did have a question come through the chat from Gail. She said, who provided the health care instructors?

Peg: I'm sorry.

Miranda Loos: She asked a question on who provided the health care instructors.

Peg: That was my CTE teacher and my ESL teacher. And that's actually a very good question because it brings up a point that I neglected to mention. Just like when I trained with LaGuardia and LaGuardia came in and trained with us because they were offering a pick up program for health, for business, and for culinary. My first question was they must have all been nurses or doctors or EMTs or something in the past and now they're getting into education.

No, none of their teachers had been employed in the health care. My teachers have not been employed in the health care industry either. What they are teaching, we'll look at in a little bit so that you can come to understand how this kind of all holds out and how it weaves into preparing people for allied health or other health care careers. So Miranda, if you just again, want to give a quick overview of EnGen and if there's any other questions, you can let me know that too.

Miranda Loos: Will do. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining the session today. EnGen just to give you a quick overview, we partner with adult education programs. We work with community colleges. We work with employers here in the state of California and of course, nationally. And essentially, what we're doing is we're offering a career focused or contextualized English upskilling platform that can align with the instructor's curriculum.

So in this case, what Peg is about to show you is their Moodle specifically for their patient care and support services and their health care program. And so the thing that EnGen offers is real world authentic content that learners can use to not only build their ESL skills but to build their technical skills and learn the terminology that's specific to the course that they're taking or the career track that they're pursuing.

So as Peg mentioned, we're constantly working with our educator partners, our employer partners, or even pulling open sources from OSHA, for example, just to give you a quick example of that. And we're pulling it into our platform and turning it into interactive activities that are available to learners at their proficiency level. And so the platform's adaptive. It offers individualized self-paced learning. So it has that wraparound service providing those learners with additional supports and Peg will show you more of how it's used in this particular model.

But having that self-paced learning on the side where learners are then coming together in the classroom where they can practice speaking, practice the output of language learning and development, get feedback, work on those [inaudible] properties and actual event to the course and the track that they're on to get those careers. So quick overview. I'll turn it back over to you, Peg, and then once she showed you the Moodle, I'll have a chance to actually show you the platform as well.

Peg: So a little information about our IET for health care careers program. The class was originally designed for people who were considering employment in the health care sector. You've done the interest inventories and all of that and the goal setting the beginning of class. So we thought we would get our students originally from people who were interested in the health care sector.

Miranda Loos: Hey, Peg.

Peg: We expected also-- I'm sorry.

Miranda Loos: We had a quick question come through. I thought it might be relevant to what you're playing into it as well. What did you do to address student barriers like with the photo IDs or any mental health or homelessness?

Peg: OK. I'm getting to that later. If I forget somehow, but it is on one of my slides, remind me and I'll circle back around to that again. But we expected to have ABE/HSC students, ESL who were level 6, NRF level six or over and adults who were testing the water to see if they really kind of wanted to go into health care or not. But most of our participants were our refugee group.

So they were newly arrived to the US. But they had experience in the health care industry in whatever country they were coming from. So that made up our original majority cohort of students were refugee students. So what we did is because this is about hybrid IET. Now one thing about our refugee students is they don't all have transportation.

They don't live near public transportation routes. Many of them, their lives are kind of switched around and upside down in everything. So what we did was we modularized our instruction. Now for the next part because we use Moodle as our learning platform, and we use free Moodle, so we're not paying for some other type of Moodle or anything else. This is all free. So I just need to stop sharing this for a second. So I can pull up the Moodle platform. And I promise I will make it as least choppy as I possibly can.

Miranda Loos: And Canvas is another LMS that can be used as well that it does allow for integrations.

Speaker: Yes, we're just getting out of using Moodle. Our Moodle will end in December.

Peg: OK. So this is our free Moodle. And the reason why I am so insanely proud of this is because it's like a textbook. It's almost like a notebook that students are able to log in and use and they do. So this is-- when they first log in, they see just this general page and what's on this first part of general information that they get to. And now I lost my cursor. Wow.

Let me-- and I can't move. Oh there it is. OK. So there is this Zoom meeting link because again, this is hybrid. We do have many refugee students coming in via Zoom. But for two days a week, we have other students who are coming in live. So it's really a hybrid classroom experience. But then there is an EnGen. And they're logged on link.

So they don't have to go kind of all over the place and where are they doing and what is going on, it's all right here. They just go to one place and everything is there. They have the medical text link and then New Jersey uses a career assistance Navigator that we are contracted to have to provide to our students. It's also really good. So it's not such a big obstacle.

But that information is also here and our former because we just recently had our career coach move on to another opportunity, her contact information is there too. And then information about just ESL class registration. But this is what the students see when they go to the general area of our Moodle. And we also have, like I said, a student made glossary. And we'll get down to that as we get further into the different weeks.

Now this was our health care IET prep program last year. The teacher since redid this and instead of going week by week by week, what she did was reworked it to be topic by topic, by topic. So here, if we look at, for example, February 7 to 11. This is an overview of icons. This is an assignment. This is a class or a lesson about filing. This was a written response, health care in our home country, tech practice and career research.

And then on another week, they would come up here. There's announcements, there's feedbacks, things going on. We had someone from the Allied Health Program come in and give a presentation. We also do math as it relates to health care careers. That's part of their learning and you can see discussions and then let me just go up here and see if I can-- here is, well, strictly speaking, EnGen used to be VOXY. But then it kind of went through a rebranding so you have to excuse the reference to VOXY. That's how that was at that time.

But you can see these are some of the areas that we worked with students through VOXY. Now remember students are doing a lot of the modules on their own, on their own time at home. They are coming either into a Zoom location, or into the classroom for live instruction twice a week.

So you can see we did EnGen, VOXY, EnGen, and HIPPA, information videos, a case study there, and medical glossary. I think this is the one where there's actually some things to view. Now I can't get in there. So Amanda, did you want-- or Miranda, excuse me, did you want to go into patient care and support at this time or do you want me to go forward and then come back to that?

Miranda Loos: I could show it right now, we you want to take a pause.

Peg: I'll stop sharing there. And are you a co-host or co-presenter? Do you have that?

Miranda Loos: No, you know what? I'd actually need to have that accessibility.

Peg: I don't have the ability to share that with you either, to give you that option.

Speaker: No Peg. Miranda and Peg are both co-hosts.

Peg: OK.

Miranda Loos: I'm going to go ahead and--

Speaker: You should be able to share.

Miranda Loos: Here you go.

Speaker: Yay.

Miranda Loos: All right. So while we're getting in here, everybody able to see the screen now?

Speaker: Yes.

Miranda Loos: OK, great. So you can see here, this is my home page. I have my navigation currently set to Spanish. It can be set and up to 20 different supported languages and the platforms also powered by Google Translate. But you can see here I have my English for patient care and support. Like I mentioned, the content that we're using to create these lessons, it's very contextualized. It's all real world authentic content. So we're not subject matter experts. We're not writing content specifically for an ESL curriculum or an IET curriculum.

So I can jump in here. But I can also just show you really briefly-- just close that-- what the actual course looks like in our platform. And so what we saw with the Moodle is that instructor is assigning certain lessons specifically to their learners as it relates to their curriculum. And of course, all of this content can be realigned to support the curriculum in sequence. It can actually be re sequenced.

But you can see some of the topic areas. Again, all of this is adaptive. And so it will adapt based on the learners proficiency level. So this particular course is starting at the low intermediate level. And it is mapped to CASAS or other NRS levels that we're happy to share with you as well.

Now if I actually log into this particular lesson, you'll see that I have three activities in each lesson. Learners have up to 200 different-- 218 different types of sequences that they'll see again, based on their proficiency level and how they're performing. We have different types of media and different types of activities from listening, speaking, reading, grammar, spelling, and you can see here, this is a video. And I'll just play it really quick.

[video playback]

- So we're going to enter the room introduce ourselves. Hi, I'm Becca. I'll be here CCNA today. And then we're going to verify the patient's identity. Can you tell me your full name?

- I'm Jack Parker.

Miranda Loos: Let me get my translation, native language, which I like.

- Thank you so much. All right. Now that we've verified our patient. We're going to tell them what we're doing. Today, we are going to check your heart rate.

[end playback]

Miranda Loos: So keep in mind, there were two other activities. And for the sake of time, I just prepped this to see the last activity. And so it is going to just assess my vocabulary. Now depending on the learners level, there will be some lexical priming activities and other different types of activities to prepare the learners with the terminology that's going to be covered.

And then Peg will be able to speak to what happens after learners use this in a self-paced way? What happens when they're actually brought back to that hybrid or online classroom. And so here I watched the video as a learner. And now I am answering these questions. Here we go.

I'll just go through this pretty quick. So you can see I'm going to get the patient's full name. I'm also going to start to check their heart rate. At the end of my lesson or my three activities, learners will see an overview of all of the vocabulary words that were covered in that particular lesson, which they then can put into Peg's glossary that she mentioned in her Moodle. So they start to build this glossary. They can listen to the vocabulary words.

[video playback]

- Birthday.

[end playback]

Miranda Loos: The vocabulary word in the [audio out] it's recovered in those lessons. Although it is not the focus, its focus focusing specifically on that skill which was introducing yourself to a patient. Learners can track all of their performance and also administrators can track all of their performance through an administrator portal that we have accessible and available to all of our partners. So the nice part is that all of this data can be tracked.

On the back end, we can assess performance and overall-- individual performance and overall program performance as well. Learners can also track their vocabulary here in our word bank and track their progress as well. So creating vocabulary cards, tracking their progress just to see how they're performing on those reading, writing skill sets, and speaking as it relates to what content or work they're doing within the classroom. And of course learners do have access to other parts of the platform as well. But what we do is try our best to guide them specifically to the patient care support services pathway that they're working on in the classroom.

So I know we're short on time. So I'm going to stop my screen share and turn it back over to Peg. But again, if you do have any other questions about the platform features and ins and outs, feel free to send me an email which I'll include in the chat. It's all yours, Peg.

Peg: OK. Thanks, Miranda. And I'm not-- I don't know why-- Oh I have to exit my PowerPoint. So if I have time at the end, then what I'll do is I'll come back into Moodle and show you our student glossary. But so the question is, how is this hybrid? Again, students work the students work on modules via the Moodle platform.

Speaker: We have 10 minutes, Peg. 10 minutes.

Peg: Sorry.

Speaker: 10 minutes. We have 10 minutes.

Peg: We're about six hours. Then they have in-person classes and the teacher is also available in person or virtually for office hours and learning is largely the accountability of each student. But at the same time, a cohort builds. Even students start to meet outside of class on Zoom. So the whole thing is, kind of, a wrap around program. And you're thinking like so what do the students really learn from this? What do they think of it?

And here is the example of one student, what she had to say about this hybrid program for IET. So she never used a QWERTY keyboard before because that's not what they had in their country. And she was able to do glossary entries and learn filing and all kinds of things. And some other students explained their fears, their misgivings, their trials, and their difficulties.

But also the teachers reflected too. So they reflected EnGen gave good examples. So it was easy to have class discussions because of the material that was in EnGen. And EnGen also allowed the students, like Miranda showed, an opportunity for them to look up words in their glossary, which then they could use to feed back into the bigger class student generated glossary.

So where are we now? Everybody loves it. But we don't have a whole lot of employers willing to take the next step. But we do have some people in the assisted and long-term care facilities are giving our students job previewing opportunities. That's not even job shadowing, it's job previewing?

Job previewing is kind of a win-win for the student and for the location because the employer gets a chance to see the potential employee in person and our student potential employee gets to visit the work site and really get an overview of what does a day in the life of this type of work or look like. And we even had some federal government glances at the health care program.

Now I should also say that when I was discussing this health care IET with Congress, there was a local elected official who said, what about-- would you do a green energy jobs IET? So I said, well, OK, when you have somebody in that kind of environment asking you to do something, you're really going to do something. But

Again, green jobs is not one of those top five in the county, but given who was asking and given the potential that green jobs could have for the surrounding counties, we went ahead and we launched something in September. Now that's six weeks ago or not even. We're not quite there with enough sufficient data and stories yet to be able to share that in this type of platform.

But the point is that brainstorming and setting up Moodle have been the easy part of this whole process. The difficult part was getting employers to the table. And I'm sure many of you are kind of wondering about OK, so how is this IET, what's the certification? What are the pass rates? What are the retention rates, all of that?

Well, our IET program, given the fact that students have such low skills, it cannot be the result of a certification because of the social security number, because of the lack of high school equivalency, or for our native born population, maybe they don't have the cleanest background. So there are still some significant barriers there.

But this is what we've done in terms of employment. So we did have career coach, and we will have another person coming in for career coaching for the students. We did have speakers come in who shared information about health care employment opportunities in the state and in the county and then our career coach also works with our students to get together their resumes or transcripts, all of their documents from their other countries and helping to facilitate the bridge with employers.

Miranda Loos: Peg. Your PowerPoint is gone.

Speaker: I'm sorry.

Miranda Loos: Your PowerPoint isn't showing.

Speaker: It's the Moodle. But that doesn't matter because we only have five minutes. Do you think you could entertain questions and answers at this point?

Peg: Sure.

Speaker: Because it's been great. A lot of wonderful information and definitely appreciate you staying up way after work today, what is it? Almost five there, time to go home, right?

Miranda Loos: So we did actually have a question come through the chat, Peg. And it says, how did you support students who showed interest in the program, but were illiterate and lacked computer skills?

Peg: We put them either into our ABE classes or we also have a separate transitions class specifically for individuals who are functioning solely at NRS level one, reading or math. When they bring their skills up, then they can go into ABE or they can transition right into our IET program. But I would like to just talk about-- and I recognize our questions everything, but I wanted to come back around to the question earlier about other barriers.

So one of the things we learned along the way was being able to have students at least in the process of getting that Social Security number, getting their work visa papers together as early as possible, if not even a prerequisite before starting the course because once you get too far in and they don't have those pieces, it really gets kind of messy in terms of helping them to be employed. And one of our partners has promised direct employment and we do have a 60% employment rate for people who are coming through this IET prep program. Another prong of it is--

Speaker: There's another question.

Peg: Directly to allied health certification programs--

Speaker: I'm sorry to interrupt you.

Peg: Has funding for that.

Speaker: I'm sorry to interrupt you, Peg. And this is very interesting. Alfred has a question in the chat about how you got instructors. And here in California, our community college, we have to approve all the curriculum, we're having a hard time with teacher shortage. He has a more detailed question there. But that's the gist of it.

Peg: Let me take a look.

Speaker: It's really extremely challenging for us to get instructors in the health care field because of our credentialing and our shortages. How are you able to-- how were you able to get your instructors? So there's actually two questions.

Peg: IET program instructors and there is no adult education certification whatsoever in New Jersey. It does not happen. So on one hand, it serves us well. But on the other hand, it really leaves holes in other areas. So we can have ESL teachers. We can have career training teachers without certifications.

But they have to have certain other qualifications to be able to fit in that. So one thing I know about allied health programs is because once you get into those specific sector areas the instructors for those carry a whole separate list of qualifications that they must need. And one thing I know is allied health instructors, especially and even LPN instructors, they are few and far between. The turnover is tremendous because there are just other opportunities for them.

Speaker: And much better wage.

Peg: An easy answer, but my recommendation is just keep looking and don't give up. Don't give up.

Speaker: So if there are any questions, I just want to make sure we close up. But if there are additional questions, do you mind, Peg, staying on. I just wanted to thank everyone for their attendance and joining us, especially want to thank you, Peg, and Miranda for explaining this. This is something we're all trying to get going in our schools here in California.

OK, now that I've done that, there's the evaluation link. And now, please, take it away and question. So sorry about the tech issues today, ladies. I apologize and thank you, again. I'm going to go ahead and lead with some questions. Anyone else have any more questions? Is it OK for you to have them unmute at this point?

Peg: Yes, absolutely. In fact, what I'll do is that's my contact information. Anyone is welcome to call my office, my cell phone, my email address are all there. I did not share Miranda's information, but she is welcome to put that in the chat. I don't know why I didn't include that slide, Miranda. So I apologize to you personally.

Miranda Loos: No worries. I just put it in the chat.

Speaker: Thank you so much you too. Anyone else here have any additional questions? I know this is a huge topic. We're all trying to get this going here in California.

Peg: And we are looking at starting a construction IET winter, spring, summer. We're kind of in the planning phase of that.

Speaker: OK. No more questions. It feels like construction out here in California all of a sudden went dead. So we're also working with the changing economies, I think you mentioned earlier.

Peg: Which I hope our construction IET can really have a seamless opportunity for students in the green jobs too.

Speaker: Peg: Won't that be fabulous? We need that all over. Definitely so. All right. Last chance folks before we end. Thank you very, very much for your time and your love for our adult ed students and all of that. So thank you very much and anyway, take good care. I'm going to go ahead and end our entire conversation then. Thank you.

Miranda Loos: Thank you, everybody.

Speaker: Bye.

Peg: Bye, everybody. Thanks for your time and thank you for coming.